On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.
Nine of them:
Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?
Lately the temperature has been perfectly reptilian.
On a sandy mesa-side, Hosteen Cheii. Proper behavior is to give him water; if you don’t have water, use spit.
And cooling it in the shade of a juniper, a pretty prairie rattler. Proper behavior is to back off in a hurry.
It stands in the middle of one of the linked plazas of a remote, dusty, fallen Pueblo complex that was abandoned, probably because of drought, sometime about 1200 C.E..
It’s not a grave. Ancestral Puebloans didn’t do graves with headstones.
It looks shrine-ish. The unassuming shrines of the Pueblos are often a careful pile of stones.
…a Giant Sequoia.
In the sand of an arroyo, roadrunner on the left—all those little Xs—coyote on the right.
...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.
Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.
The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows:
See July 5 post. What are they?
Like the circle in the earlier post, this one was in the wrong place and with the wrong doorway opening to be a hogan ring. Its lichened stones were next to the collapsed foundations of a Puebloan fieldhouse, ca. 1300s (my best guess; post-Chaco). But it didn’t have the sunken center typical of a kiva depression, and seemed too small for that as well.
Beautiful potsherds.
Remember to turn potsherds face down again to protect the paint.
Still too hot for more than a short hike, but there had been rain; there’s hope for a cooler season. The gaiters need mending:
…but—next to the fallen foundation of a Navajo hogan—that old blue enamel coffee pot may be beyond repair.
Not Navajo. Often a stone circle is the foundation of a traditional hogan, but this is in the wrong place–over a lava field, no grazing near–and the “doorway” break faces west, not east.
Puebloan? There are tumbled Ancestral Puebloan structures in the neighborhood, but they’re all square-cornered. Nor can it be a kiva, because it was built right on the sandstone slabs.
The fallen ponderosa that divides it neatly in half is old, but thick lichen says the circle is much, much older.
What was it?
We had come down off the mesa capstone, down a draw onto a hidden level. There were axe-cut junipers, a few chert flakes. Suddenly my companion gave a shout: On an anthill at the mesa edge, he had found a tiny crumb of turquoise.
It was the true-blue thing. Unworked, totally out of place on the sandstone. Who had dropped it, and when? A Navajo trader-silversmith? But we’d seen none of the stone circles that are the foundations of old hogans.
Or was it an offering? Contemporary Zunis mix bits of turquoise into the white cornmeal, k’aweawe, that is used for blessing, That remote mesa edge, now the middle of nowhere, was distant from Zuni in both space and time, but for thousands of years it had been the middle of a lively somewhere. Had someone once stood there on the east-facing mesa rim, sprinkling cornmeal for the morning prayer?
No way to know. We said elakwah—“thank you” in Zuni—and left the turquoise with its ants.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 